Teaching Social Science

Three goals: impart information, spur deeper thinking about the topic and the social world more generally, and inculcate care in thinking. As is perhaps clear, working toward achieving any one of these goals creates positive externalities that help achieve other goals. For instance, care in exposition, which is a necessary though insufficient condition for imparting correct information, is liable to produce, either through mimesis or further thought, care in how students think about questions.

Supplement such synergies by actively seeking and utilizing pertinent opportunities during both, class-wide discussions about the materials, and one-to-one discussions about research projects, to raise (and clarify) relevant points. During discussions, encourage students to seriously consider questions about epistemology, fundamental to science but also more generally to reasoning and discourse, by weaving in questions such as, “What is the claim that we are making?”, and “When can we make this claim and why?”.

Some of the epistemological questions are most naturally (and perhaps best) handled when students are engaged in working on their own research projects. Guiding students as they collect and analyze their own data provides unique opportunities to discuss issues related to research design, and logic. And it is my hunch that students are more engaged with the material (and hence learn more of it, and think more about it) when they work on their own projects than when asked to learn the materials through lectures alone. For instance, undergraduates at Stanford often excel at knowing the points made in the text, but often have yet to spend time thinking about the topic itself. My sense is (and some experience corroborates it) that thinking broadly about an issue allows students to gain new insights, and helps them contextualize their findings better. It also spurs curiosity about the social world and the broader set of questions about society. Hence, in addition to the above, ask students to discuss the topics that they are working on more generally, and think carefully and deeply about what else could be going on.